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link building - changed time-frames

Hello everyone.
I have built around 4-5 high quality backlinks to website in around 2-3 days.
Then got pause around 5 days, before new link.
Meantime, due this pause I got 5th ranking at SERP for some keywords. But later, I'm totally disappeared from SERP.
My question is, how to get back my rankings? Just build new quality backlinks to website, not so fast?

18 Responses

5 high-quality backlinks within 3 days is never going to raise an eyebrow - even 5 spam links within 3 days shouldn't cause a problem. Its when you've got loads of links coming in on a daily basis, from clearly spammy websites, that you might want to be concerned.

The SERPs fluctuate so rapidly that in most cases it's impossible to correlate your daily ranking changes to anything you have done to your site a day or two beforehand. Since it's only been a few days, it's very possible that Google hasn't even crawled your new backlinks (and applied them to your site) yet.

Was this week the first time that you appeared on page 1? - If so, I would suggest you continue the work you are doing and monitor your results over a longer period of time (2 weeks would provide more solid info to work with)

If, on the other hand, you've been ranking on page 1 for a good while now, then I'd suggest you look into any other changes you have made to the site in the past week...meta titles, copy changes, outbound links etc

There's a lot of different variables at work here so it's very difficult to determine the exact cause for your disappearance in the SERPs. I would suggest that you make sure that your links appear as natural as possible to the search engines. If you add 5 high quality links to your website all with the exact same anchor text "your keyword" within a very short period of time it might appear spammy. A more natural approach would be one with varying anchor text and links that slowly accumulate over an extended period of time.

It's very rare that Google will punish your website for something that occurs off-page. But they might completely ignore links to your website. If they punished websites for off-page factors competitors would be sabotaging each other.

Also it's important for you to not look at your rankings on a day to day basis. There are a lot of different things at work in the SERPs all of which do not occur in real-time. e.g. one of your high quality links might not yet be reflected in the SERPs. While you might have disappeared from the SERP it is not uncommon for you to reappear within a few days.

I apologize for the bluntness, but that is categorically false. Google absolutely punishes sites for 'bad neighborhood' affiliations through back links. You can find many instances on the SEO boards of this occurring. We actually report spam sites through GWT that link to us about once per month due to a prior penalty that occurred this way.

Agreeing Scott, that it is probably not due to backlinks. Imagine a link bait when you get hundreds of links in a very short time. Nobody would do link bait as it would hurt their SEO of google was penalizing this way.

Falling back from 5th place to nowhere is a serious signal. I am pretty sure you have done something else to your site other than building links. The problem should be there. Have you tested your site with the on page reports for example? Maybe that can give you an idea to start with.

Could be that page received rankings initially because content was so fresh. When algorithm determined that fresh was all you had, that people weren't sharing your page frequently to the point of virality, that fresh wore off quickly and the page disappeared from SERPs (as it should).

I'd love to hear more about your experience and references in determining the right amount of original content versus copied content.

Kirill, unique content is important. When you are saying the content is not unique, are you saying it is copied on other parts of your sites, or that it is copied from other sites online? Make sure that you're not violating any copyright laws with your content.

I was trying to say that if there are some snippets repeated or copied from other sites or pages that is not considered a duplicate content. I think that if 30% of content is copied than it is not duplicate, however I did not invastigate the exact amount where google starts to consider your page duplicate. Did I say something wrong?

You're going to have a hard time ranking if your content isn't original and you don't have a real good reason for visitors to come to your site. You'll want to add your own information and rewrite the manufacturer's description. Give Google a good reason to show your site in search results, and give value to your visitors.

Zsolt, I am both an associate here trying to make sure that people who ask questions get the best answers, and a person who wants to learn. When a number is thrown out as "x is OK", I'm always interested in learning more about how that recommendation came about, as it can help me learn from the experience of others, or from a statement from Google that I may have missed. I do get worried when numbers are thrown out without any context or other details and someone may treat them as gospel because it was published on the SEOmoz domain.

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